$1.5 million Australian expedition to Antarctica

Professor Chris Turney from the University of NSW is mounting the largest Australian science expeditions to the Antarctic with an 85-person team to try to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might be already shifting weather patterns in Australia.

Transcript

plusminus

EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: A modern-day scientist adventurer is about to undertake one of the largest Australian science expeditions to the Antarctic. Professor Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales and an 85-person team will spend two months trying to answer questions about how climate change in the frozen continent might already be shifting weather patterns in Australia. The $1.5 million expedition is driven by a unique 100-year-old legacy, the largely forgotten scientific records taken by Australia's heroic Antarctic explorer, Sir Douglas Mawson. Margot O'Neill has this special report. Brett Evans was the producer, Chris Schembri, the editor.

MARGOT O'NEILL, REPORTER: Here in hot, dusty Queensland, scientist Chris Turney is training for the icy desolation of Antarctica. He and his team must learn how to drive this all-terrain vehicle, because if sea ice collapses under them, this vehicle will float.

CHRIS TURNEY, CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH CENTRE, UNSW: So we've got to cross this sea ice of 60 kilometres to try to get into the windiest place in the world.

MARGOT O'NEILL: It'll be one of the largest Australian science expeditions to Antarctica, covering nearly 10,000 kilometres, with an 85-person team, including 60 scientists from marine biologists to meteorologists to ice core specialists.

CHRIS TURNEY: Packing emergency bags for when we're on the sea ice in Antarctica, making sure everything's in each bag. It is a reality check. It's very much - it's suddenly, "Gosh, this is really happening."

MARGOT O'NEILL: The research stakes are high. Antarctica is one of the great engines driving the world's oceans, winds and weather, especially in Australia. But there's ominous signs of climate change.

CHRIS TURNEY: The Southern Hemisphere westerly winds encircle Antarctica, and over the last 20 or 30 years or so, they've been pushing further south. Now - so actually in a way it's almost like Antarctica's withdrawing itself from the rest of the world.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Initially linked with the ozone hole, which is now stabilising, this southward retreat of Antarctic winds continues, most probably because of increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The wind shift has already been linked with dramatically reduced rainfall in south-west Western Australia.

CHRIS TURNEY: So the result is that during the wintertime when we see this delivery of moisture into Australia - southern Australia, New Zealand, that's going to become less and less common. That's the implication of our observation.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Just what else is could mean for Australia is an urgent priority for the scientists. In one of the most extreme environments on the planet, they'll collect thousands of measurements and samples.

CHRIS TURNEY: There's so much out there that we just don't understand and you can only do so much of computer models, you can only do so much of satellites. You have to get on the ground, we have to drop floats into the ocean, we have to drop - drill through the ice, we have to collect samples, drill the trees in the sub-Antarctic islands, see how the actual ecology is responding to changes and then pull it all together.

MARGOT O'NEILL: They'll use drones for high resolution photography and mapping. And submersibles to measure ocean temperature and salinity and yet their expedition is only possible because of breathtakingly courageous science done 100 years ago, but now largely forgotten.

Anglo-Irishman Ernest Shackleton and Australian scientist explorer Douglas Mawson barely survived Antarctica early last century. The Englishman Robert Scott famously did not. Feted as heroic icemen, they were Chris Turney's boyhood heroes, but their scientific reports might be their most important legacy.

CHRIS TURNEY: 100 years or so ago, if you were going down to Antarctica, you were scientist and an explorer. You couldn't go down and go into this amazing environment and not make observations, and if you were going down to make observations, you had to be of an adventurous sort because this was off the map. This was the Edwardian equivalent of space travel. No-one knew what was there.

MARGOT O'NEILL: These early explorers hauled heavy sledges for hundreds of kilometres on starvation rations in extreme weather, stopping to collect rocks and record measurements. Even as Robert Scott trekked towards death, he discarded sleeping bags, but not 16 kilograms of geological specimens. Even as Douglas Mawson's colleagues died ...

CHRIS TURNEY: Even on that day, he was still making weather observations.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Some of Sir Douglas Mawson's original gear is in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum.

CHRIS TURNEY: Those guys were man-hauling, dragging those things across the landscape, and nowadays, they drag 'em behind the Ski-Doo, so a lot easier! ...

... They capture your imagination. You think, "Good grief, these are guys, albeit it with beards and heavy jumpers, who were having an amazing adventure, but actually trying to understand and discover something that we just didn't know before. Mawson constantly argued that was actually how the expedition would be ranked, how it would be considered for posterity. It was important to get this data out there.

MARGOT O'NEILL: And what an astonishing legacy it is, dwarfing Professor Chris Turney's ambitions. Mawson's team recorded hundreds of thousands of meteorological measurements and they're now vital to tracking global warming.

CHRIS TURNEY: I just had not appreciated just how much data there was. I just thought it would be a few little reports. I mean, the Mawson books, it's that length (hands wide apart) - it's a bookcase worth. It's just remarkable how much information they generated. And so to have this precious archive of detailed, rigorous observations from this extreme environment which we can now compare to 100 years later is remarkably precious.

MARGOT O'NEILL: It's the reason Professor Chris Turney and 60 other scientists are going back to Antarctica.

CHRIS TURNEY: So our aim as the Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013-'14 is to actually repeat those measurements from 100 years ago and also apply some new methods.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Already there's one incredible result using the century-old data. Leopard seals seem to have shrunk in size by about 10 per cent.

CHRIS TURNEY: Is that diet, is that environment, changes in ocean circulation have affected the diet? It's just one of those - another great question.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Just one of many Professor Turney and the others will try to address. And along the way, he also hopes to revive the spirit of scientific discovery that drove the ice men on by inspiring a new generation of scientists.

ELEANOR RAINSLEY, PHD STUDENT: It's far more exciting to go out and climb hills and hit things with hammers than it is to sit in front of a computer all day.

CHRISTOPHER BULL, PHD STUDENT: One of the great appeals of an expedition like this is that we get to see some oceanographic science out in the real world. 'Cause our day-to-day jobs are using numerical models.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Douglas Mawson's great-granddaughter, Dimity Mitsis, believes her great-grandfather and his team of explorers would've been thrilled to know science has again become the real Antarctic hero.

DIMITY MITSIS, MAWSON'S GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER: It's kind of nice to bring it back to what Mawson's, you know, main focus was, which is science.

MARGOT O'NEILL: How would they feel about that?

CHRIS TURNEY: I think they'd be blown away.

MARGOT O'NEILL: Margot O'Neill, Lateline.

EMMA ALBERICI: And tomorrow night, in the second part of this special report, could the British Antarctic explorer Robert Scott have lived? We look at how Professor Turney discovered that choosing the right team can be a matter of life and death. That's tomorrow night.